A Letter to My Fellow Jewish Americans
Last week a young man killed two employees of the Israeli embassy outside a Jewish museum in Washington DC. The mainstream press — and most Jewish American organizations — tried to paint this as a pure act of antisemitism. I wrote last week that the attacker’s motives didn’t appear antisemitic at all. They seemed targeted at Israeli embassy employees. In the last few days, my reading of it has been borne out. Israel’s ambassador to America confirmed it. And as we can now see from the chats of Elias Rodriguez, he was no raging antisemite — he was just a normal guy into leftwing politics who was driven insane by the non-stop slaughter he’s been seeing on social media every day. In that sense, he’s no different than millions of other people — except that maybe he had more empathy and less holding him back than the rest of us…and it drove him past the point of no return.
So I want to say this to many of my fellow Jews in America: I know you are desperate to justify and deflect your support for Israel’s actions. You’ll claim that the mass murder and starvation of Palestinians is all made up. You’ll say that Israel is the most moral country on earth, legitimately fighting for survival. I know that a lot of you think that all those murder videos coming out of Gaza are fake — that it’s all Pallywood. I know you’re in full-on denial mode and are desperate to peg all opposition to the Israeli-American extermination campaign as antisemitism. “If they’re no genocide and it’s all made up, they just hate us for being us. They just hate Jews!” you say to yourself.
This denial may work on you, but it has little power in the larger world. You’ve been sheltered for far too long, thinking that you and your children would never bear the cost of your political decisions. But here is the thing: What happened in Washington DC…there is a lot more of the same kind of violence coming our way. And it’s all your fault.
Many Jews here are against the genocide — some of the best people opposing the Israel-American slaughter are in fact Jews. The problem is that a powerful faction of Jews in America has been working hard to make Jewish identity synonymous with Israel, and thus synonymous with genocide. These orgs don’t mind making common cause with real antisemites and anti-Jewish fanatics. As long as you’re pro-Israel, you’re welcomed into their camp. Most of the big and powerful Jewish institutions here — both secular and religious, from Reform all the way to Chabad — have been complicit in the campaign. This wing of the Jewish community has helped pump vast quantities of pain and suffering into the world, and this pain and suffering is bound to come around.
A lot of Jews have convinced themselves that Israel guarantees Jewish safety. But Israel has done the exact opposite. It puts Jews at risk like never before. Zionism — this stupid dream of a pure Jewish state — has in the last two years put Jews on a religious murder spree the likes of which they haven’t seen since the Roman days. And that murder and hate is coming back to us now…coming back for us all. It won’t matter if you support Israel or if you loathe the hick supremacist ideology that powers Jewish identity today. When the blowback comes, it won’t distinguish the finer points of your identity.
The grim fact, and this should scare you, is that there are lot of young people like Elias Rodriguez — people who pine for justice, but who look to the future and see little hope. Maybe they’ve been priced out of being able to have a family. Maybe they’re facing the prospect of a life working precarious jobs with no meaning. Maybe they’re just too sensitive, empaths with a sense of purpose in a sociopathic consumerist society that gives them none. They’re almost certainly too educated for their own good. They’ve read history and maybe some theory. They know how hard it is to change anything politically in America, and they know deep down that a shitty atomized existence is all that they’ll be offered — a shitty existence in a society that brutalizes it own people as much as it brutalizes those abroad. And like many of us, these young people are terminally online — nerves fried by being plugged in too much from too early an age. For over a year now they’ve had their brains melted by seeing genocide on their feed — little babies burned and blown apart and mutilated every single day. All of it being done with the full complicity of their own government and their own civil society — from their city council to their university all the way up to the federal level. And some of these kids are gonna react. They’re gonna snap. They're gonna lash out. It won’t be organized. But it will come from a place of pain and frustration and a desire for justice…from a sense that their own society has failed them and that they have to act.
I write this because I can see a bit of myself in Elias. If I didn’t have anyone to live for — if I didn’t have a daughter and a wife and was all alone — I could easily see myself being driven to the edge like him. There’s another aspect to it, too. I’ve been a journalist for most of my adult life. And a big depressing realization that I’ve come to is that journalism is dead. Journalism has little power to change anything. Israel demonstrated this point to me like nothing else. The 24/7 live-streams showing mass murder…the nonstop commentary, the constant Youtube debates with headlines like “X DESTROYS PIERS MORGAN,” the stream of article upon article exposing what is going on and who is responsible in just about every language on earth — none of it has made an impact. America and the EU remain steadfast and complicit, while other world powers remain conspicuously aloof. If I had nothing else in life except my journalism, this realization alone might have been enough to push me into lone shooter territory. And I would have used all the investigative skills I’ve developed in the last 17 years to choose a worthy target. I would have put all my energies into it, treating it as the most impactful assignment of my life. But…don’t worry. You can thank my family for preemptively disarming me.
In closing, I want to say to the Jews in America who support this abomination: I know you won’t listen and you probably will never read these words. But still I have to try. Give up your biblical-nationalist fantasies before it is too late. We all live in one world. We’re all connected. Continuing on this path will only bring ruin and death.
—Yasha
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Thanks for this, Yasha. From here the level of denial - like the nature of "coverage" - just looks and more insane. One of my former colleagues, missing for over a year, was just returned as a bag of remains. There's no moral compass to
be found in any of this. But to barefacedly keep claiming it as somehow defending a(ny) religion is truly obscene.
About the complicity of NATO countries, and the inaction of the rest, I wonder if this has to do with what Elaine Scarry called the Nuclear Aristocracy. I didn't read the book, but her thesis, from what the review I read years ago in Counterpunch said, is that countries with nukes can get away with much more than others simply because of what Moshe Dayan said: "Israel must be a mad dog, too dangerous to bother".
Dominic de Villepin said last week that the EU should cut all relations with Israel, cease all arms sales and support sending its leadership to the Hague. Jim Kavanagh has said that Turkey should mount an aid flotilla with armed escort and land on Gaza to deliver relief while daring Israel to strike at them. Others have voiced similar solutions.
But all I can see is those solutions working as the trigger to the events that form the setting of the novel you're writing, Two Pigeons/Radiance.
Yes, they have an interest in keeping Israel as their attack dog in the Middle East. Yes, this is about money and power. But even if it weren't, I think NATO leaders, as well as everyone else, would go full Herman Kahn/Dr. Strangelove and do calculations of what would cause fewer deaths. And letting the Palestinians die might well look as the preferable option to them.
I think Israel is by far the most dangerous and paranoid nuclear power, precisely because of the mentality Zionists - and the vast majority of Israeli Jews seem to have fallen into the grip of this pernicious ideology - have developed and you describe in this letter. We've just seen how even the extremely perilous, continuing antagonism between Pakistan and India isn't as dangerous: both countries know to de-escalate and how. In my mind, the moment Iran so much as announced they had the bomb, Israel would send theirs flying in pretty much the all-round-volley fashion your novel describes. If we just think of the Samson Option, it's lunatic stuff.
I imagine Israeli double-passport intellectual elite might get fed up and leave that deranged place, to the point that Israel would become an economically impaired, dysfunctional backwater without anything to offer the world. Some say half a million have already left. But I don't set much store by that kind of optimism. They could go back to being shepherds and would still be shepherds with nukes on hair trigger.